Family

I have to figure Roberta Mittleman was a resolute mother. She was firm when her son, Max Goldstein, whined, pleaded and bargained with her to lift the restrictions she had put on violent video games. "No," she said. And "No" again.

Eventually, of course, she cracked.

Kids will do that to you.

And Max, who is 12, might have gone on blowing people away, sundering cities and otherwise unleashing a slaughterhouse of virtual bloodshed, except for one thing.

Max is from Newtown. And after Dec. 14, 2012, he had had enough.

After attending the funeral of his friend's brother, Daniel Barden, one of the victims of the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary, he was sick and tired of killing. Even virtual killing.

Max, a middle school student, began a movement called "Played Out," which urges kids to follow his example and throw their video games in the dump.

The Hartford Courant reported that Max's father has helped him place a refuse bin outside the Newtown Youth Academy sports center to collect all the video games kids want to jettison.

Let's hope Played Out creates mountains of refuse.

We're a species that likes answers. We like them clear and obvious and definitive. No reputable studies have shown a concrete link between the use of violent video games and the perpetration of violence. No definitive lines can be drawn between the consumption of violent movies and a predilection for brutality. Nor will any be drawn here between gun possession and lethal use of firearms.

But what is happening in our society, not just in Newtown, but every place scarred by butchery, hopelessness and grief, cannot be reduced to a single cause. Whatever is happening is part of this stew we have created in which violence is laced into our culture in a manner so pernicious and insidious that we hardly recognize it. Does it really take a 12-year-old sitting at the funeral of a grade schooler to show us what needs to be done?

Perhaps there's no relationship between violent video games, like the top-selling "Call of Duty," and violence. But at least one video game maker, Electronic Arts, linked the website of its violent video game to a website that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear portrayed in the game, The New York Times reported. You, too, could get yourself a high-powered sniper rifle and high-capacity magazine just like those used in "Medal of Honor Warfighter."

Elsewhere, in the violence-spewing culture, the Weinstein Company hastily canceled a premiere of Quentin Tarantino's violence-drenched "Django Unchained." Paramount's scuttled its premiere of Tom Cruise's new "action" film, "Jack Reacher."

The films weren't pulled. Heavens, no. Not with so much money on the line. They were merely quietly injected into our culture stream, another poison into a collective body that has nearly been inoculated to the effects of violence.

The New York Times has reported that Hollywood was quietly wringing its hands over the tragedy — not that it was ready to mend its ways. "The shooting has prompted soul searching of a more personal kind in the entertainment capital," the paper reported. "Hollywood's power lunches have been filled in recent days with conversations about hypocrisy, according to people in the industry: Many of those who are liberal leaning and support gun control also make their livings selling violent images."

Yes, we're all for causes — as long as they don't put a chink in our dividends.

But is Hollywood to blame? In a way, that's like blaming McDonald's for the obesity epidemic. Nobody's forcing those SUVs through the golden arches. There's an appetite and McDonald's satisfies it.

I fear that those of us who prayed for peace following Newtown, asked for it as if it were some kind of celestial rain that would shower benevolently upon us. But the faithful know that peace germinates from within. It flourishes when we turn away from crudeness and savagery and toward tenderness and serenity. It does not come unbidden.

Every time we hand over cold, hard currency for brutal, coarse indecency, we assent to a culture of violence.

I am reminded of the wise words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel, "Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible."

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Shortly after the mall doors opened, Douglas and Ouley Saulsberry made their rounds through the hallways. They walk the halls of both levels every day except Sunday, getting in about four miles before most stores open at 10 a.m.